A Light To The Heart E-Book

Barbara Cartland

• Herausgeber: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 349

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Lovely Elita Garson knew she must escape. She must be freed from her golden chains to make her own life and her own friends. When she walks out of the luxurious London hotel she has been staying in, she takes nothing but a single suitcase - and her hopes of an independent life. She quickly finds work as an airhostess on a privately chartered plane, and then secures a better job working for the elderly passenger she met onboard. Excited by her new freedom, Elita soon discovers that life has turned very complicated, mysterious and at times dangerous. Complicated by falling head over heels in love with a hotel valet, of whom she knows little about – mysterious and often violent goings on with her new employer, and danger when she is drawn into a web of theft, lies and deception. In this exciting romantic tale set in beautiful Copenhagen, can Elita give up the luxuries she was born to and find the happiness she is searching for?

Leseprobe

1

“Money! Money! Money! All you think about is money!”

Elita shouted the words at her father, rising from the table as she did so and walking angrily towards the window, her nylon negligée floating around her as she moved.

Her father laughed. It was not a pleasant sound, and it was one well known to his opponents in the financial world.

“I seem to have heard that remark before,” he said sarcastically, his shrewd eyes watching his daughter as she gazed with unseeing eyes out of the window on to the roofs of London.

“Yes, you have heard it before,” she said, “and you will hear it again. Your whole life is bounded and limited by money. It is all that concerns you. You are not interested in people’s hearts – or their souls. You are interested only in what you can touch and handle, in what they can make for you, in what they can bring you. Money! To you, human beings have no nationality – only the price at which they were bought!”

Elita’s words tumbled over themselves as she spoke them, vehemently and with a passion that made her eyes flash and animated her whole face into something almost surprisingly beautiful. Her father watched her appreciatively, and made a sudden irritated shrug of his shoulders.

“What you are saying is purely words,” he said. “They sound rather splendid and courageous but when it comes down to it, what do you know about money – except how to spend it?”

“I am what you have made me,” Elita retorted. “It has always been the same, ever since I was a child. ‘You can’t know little Jean who lives down the road, her parents haven’t any money! You can’t associate with the boys who have asked you to their dance, they haven’t any money. What is more, they’re after yours.”

She stamped her small foot.

“Money has set me apart – ‘That rich Garson girl!’ People talk to me in a different voice because I’m your daughter. Even at school I was given special privileges because you asked for them. ‘We can’t afford to offend Mr. Garson,’ I heard one of the mistresses say once. ‘He might pull the school down over our heads’.”

“I’ve never made a take-over bid for a school yet,” Granite Garson said mildly.

“Then it’s about the only thing you haven’t tried to take over,” Elita retorted. “All through my life it has been the same. People have been nervous, fearful of me. I have been segregated, kept apart, just because you are rich, and you don’t allow people to forget it.”

“And I suppose you have never enjoyed spending my money?” Granite Garson asked.

Elita turned from the window and walked across to the breakfast table.

“Of course I have liked having beautiful clothes, lovely furs, magnificent jewellery,” she said. “But where has it got me? That’s what you ask when you spend money, isn’t it? What is it going to get you in return? I’m asking that question now. Has money brought me friends? Only the friends you have chosen for me. Has it brought me happiness? Well, I ask you, do I sound happy?”

“Now look here, Elita,” her father said. “If it upsets you so much, I’ll ask these young people to stay. I didn’t know they meant so much to you.”

“They don’t,” Elita replied. “That’s just the point, I have only met Dickie and Zara Manfield twice, but because I suggested asking them down to the country, what do you do? Have them investigated, set your spies to find out all about them. They discover that Dickie’s estates are mortgaged, and that Zara is trying to marry Lord what’s his name? I can’t remember what you said. So what? Why should you go to all this trouble? Why? Except that you are so frightened that they will get their hands on twopence-ha’penny of my money. Spongers is what you called them!”

Granite Garson got up from the breakfast table and threw down his paper with a bang.

“If they mean so much to you, have them,” he said wearily. “Give them all your allowance if it pleases you. I really don’t care a damn one way or another.”

“You do care, that’s the point,” Elita replied. “You care enough to go on surrounding me with this ridiculous wall of gold. I’m twenty, don’t forget. In another six months I shall be twenty-one and I don’t suppose I have ever taken a breath without it being tainted with the smell of money.”

She walked across the room to face him.

“I haven’t a friend who isn’t suspect,” she went on. “I have no acquaintances except those you have chosen for me. I go from one gilded cage in the country to stay in other gilded cages with your over-rich, over-fed friends. I tell you I am sick of it – sick of the whole thing.”

She sat down and thumped her clenched fists on the table.

“I don’t care about Dickie and Zara Manfield – they don’t worry me in the slightest. But I loathe and detest the methods by which you have found out about them, by which you have poisoned my mind almost before I know them, so that every time they ask me to give them a cigarette, I shall suspect they are really trying to get at my bank balance.”

Mr. Garson looked at his watch.

“I have got to get down to the City,” he said. “Ask whom you like to the party – but remember when you are being hoity-toity about my money, that without it you would find life pretty uncomfortable and the world by no means the warm and friendly place it is now.”

“Warm and friendly!” Elita exclaimed. “Don’t make me laugh! Surrounded by your sycophants - guarded, protected and imprisoned. I might as well be in a harem.”

“You should try the world outside,” Mr Garson answered. “I doubt if the northwest wind of poverty would be very much to your liking.”

“That’s a very good idea,” Elita replied rising. “That is just what I will do. You think that because you have brought me up in golden cottonwool I couldn’t stand being without it, and that because I’ve always been able to buy everything I wanted, without a thought of what it was going to cost, I couldn’t manage on a small budget. That is just where you are wrong.”

Mr Garson looked at the clock over the mantelpiece.

“One day, you shall persuade me how right you are,” he commented soothingly. “In the meantime, be a good girl, eat up your breakfast and ask the Manfields – or whatever their name is – for the weekend.”

For a moment Elita didn’t answer. She stood and looked at him, her eyes very large and dark in her small, pointed face.

She was a little over five feet four in height and in her satin mules, instead of the high heels she habitually wore, she looked little more than a child – an unhappy, discontented child with pouting lips and a frown on her white forehead.

“Keep your arguments for me tonight,” Granite Garson smiled, “but don’t forget there’s a Bentley outside waiting to take you shopping and our rooms in the hotel are costing us something like thirty pounds a day.”

Before she had time to reply, he went from the room. Elita heard the low voice of the valet as he handed Mr Garson his bowler hat and rolled umbrella. She heard the outer door of their apartment close and knew that her father had gone.

She sank down on one of the soft, satin-covered sofas. She felt suddenly deflated, almost exhausted by her own anger, her own resentment – and she knew with a sense of helplessness that what she had said and what she had felt had had precisely no effect on her father.

She could rage and scream at him, but he just brushed it to one side as not being of the least consequence. She was his daughter – she would do as he wanted, and that was all there was to it. Granted, he had conceded the point that the Manfields, after all he had said about them, could still come and stay for the weekend. But she knew now that she never wanted to see them again. However nice they were, however pleasant they might be, she would always suspect them because of what her father had discovered about them.

At the thought of her father’s spy system, she rose from the sofa and walked restlessly across the room. She hated it! Hated it! At times she even hated him.

Once, she remembered, he had been different. He had still been ambitious, still been ruthless when it came to business, but there had been a softer side to him. That was when her mother was alive and he had gone home at night to someone who loved him for himself, who was not the least interested in his money.

“Not more millions, John!” she had heard her mother say once with a note almost of despair in her voice. “What shall we do with it? How can we ever spend it in a thousand years? We can only eat four meals a day – we can only sleep in one bed.”

Her father had laughed, and oblivious of Elita watching them with wide eyes, had swept her mother into his arms and kissed her tenderly.

“Why aren’t you like other women?” he asked. “Why don’t you want emeralds, rubies and diamonds to hang round your neck? Why don’t you want a dozen cars in the garage and racehorses to carry your colours at Ascot?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, John,” his wife had answered, disentangling herself from his embrace and starting to pick up Elita’s scattered toys. “You know I am happy here alone with you. I don’t want to go to Ascot, and I certainly can’t wear an abnormal amount of jewellery walking around the garden. You had much better spend your money on a church or something.”

But it was then that he had started to put what Elita called a gold fence around his family. He went out into the world, but his home remained an oasis of peace and quiet where money did not matter, where there was only love and happiness because they were a united family.

Then Elita’s mother died. She could remember, almost as if it were yesterday, how she had cried and sobbed and how no one had been able to comfort her.

“It is your father whom you should be thinking about,” her nurses replied. “Try and comfort him, child.”

Even in the midst of her own misery, Elita had wanted to do that, but try as she would, she could not get near to her father. He had shut himself away from her, as he had from everyone else. He could not speak of his unhappiness – would not admit it. Gradually, so gradually that at first she did not notice it, he became the hard, ruthless man they called “Granite” Garson. He judged everything and everybody by one measuring stick. He was interested in the financial empire he had built around himself.

Intent on her education, Elita did not understand until she was seventeen, how greatly the attitude was likely to affect her own life. Then at a luncheon party, she heard someone speaking casually to her father.,

“How pretty Elita is these days. She will be getting married soon, John. The men will be around her like flies around a honey pot.”

She had seen her father’s face darken.

“No fortune hunter is going to entice my daughter up the aisle,” he said.

The woman he was talking to smiled.

“Not all young men are fortune hunters – and if Elita has got to find a man as rich as she is, it’s going to limit her dancing partners very considerably.”

“You can leave that to me,” Granite Garson had said grimly.

That year, when she was officially a debutante, Elita learned what he had meant. Everyone she met was scrutinised, investigated and, in nine cases out of ten, removed from her horizon so that if she met them later at a party, or any other function, they made no further attempt to speak to her.

It took her a few months to realise that her acquaintances were limited to the sons and daughters of her father’s friends, and a few girls with whom she had been at school and whose parents, though not friendly with Granite Garson, were in the position to class themselves in the category of being very rich.

“Money! Money! Money!”

Elita repeated the words to herself disdainfully now as she walked round and round the room, rather like an animal in a cage. A waiter opened the door.

“May I clear the breakfast, miss?”

“Yes, please do.”

She watched him wheel away the table, aware as she did so that she had had nothing to eat and had only taken a sip of her morning coffee. It was as she had sat down to breakfast, coming in later after her father had started, that he had told her what he had discovered about the Manfields. She did not care particularly whether they were invited for the weekend or not. She had liked Dickie Manfield, finding him amusing and cheerful and a very good dancer. She had liked Zara too, because she was pretty and always appeared so light-hearted and carefree.

She walked across to the writing desk. So far, they had three guests for the weekend. The first was Reggie Pound. His father was in the City and chairman of a dozen companies in which her own father was interested. The second was Sybil Crossley. Her father was a millionaire, and she and Elita had been forced into a rather artificial friendship ever since they were children. Elita didn’t like Sybil, she never had, and she was quite certain that Sybil didn’t like her.

The other guest was Alan Doughty. Elita’s face altered as she read his name. She was well aware why he had been asked, and she knew too that where he was concerned the mere fact of his presence was dangerous. Her father had set his heart on her marrying Alan. He was the young man he had chosen for her over a year ago.

Alan was everything Granite Garson would approve of in a son-in-law. He was immensely rich, extremely industrious, absorbingly ambitious and likely to make his mark not only in the City, but in the world of politics. At the same time, he was a crashing bore.

Elita had begun by thinking Alan was a joke, but now she was afraid both of him and of her father. They were wearing her down, she thought. Wherever she went, whatever she did, Alan was there.

“Oh, by the way, I have asked Alan,” her father would say casually when she had fixed up a theatre party.

“I am afraid I haven’t got an extra ticket,” Elita would reply.

“Oh, I saw to that before I asked him,” her father would explain, and she began to suspect that he had instructed his secretary, whenever theatre tickets were bought, to take one extra on top of whatever number she had asked for, so that Alan could come too.

Alan took her out whenever they were in London. Alan came to stay nearly every weekend. Last night, Alan had dined with them here at Claridge’s, where they were staying, and then they had all gone to a theatre and finished up at the Savoy for supper.

It was as she was dancing in the ballroom that Elita suddenly realised that she was bored – bored with Alan, bored with the effort of dancing with him, bored with the sheer idea that another hour at least must pass before she could go home and be rid of him.

‘There’s nothing bad about him,’ she thought. ‘He’s just a bore.’

“You are looking very pretty tonight.”

She could hear his voice, smooth and solemn, above the rhythm of the music. His fingers, holding her hand, tightened a little.

“Thank you for the compliment,” she said lightly.

“It wasn’t meant as a compliment,” he replied. “I was merely telling you the truth.”

“Then I am flattered you should think so,” Elita said.

“I am coming down for the weekend,” Alan went on. “I don’t know whether you know, but your father asked me. Don’t have too many people, there is something I want to ask you.”

She had known what he meant by the rather embarrassed way in which he spoke and the look in his eyes. In a sudden panic, she had turned and left him on the dance floor and walked back to their table.

Feverishly, she began to think of all the people she could invite for the weekend, and with something like horror, realised how few people she knew – few people, that was, whom her father would permit her to invite home.

It was ridiculous – absurd – and yet she had to face the fact that she knew very few young people. There were masses of her father’s friends, business acquaintances, but they would be no protection against that question that Alan wanted to ask her.

“What a charming boy Alan is,” her father had said as they drove back to Claridge’s in the car that had been waiting for them.

Elita had not answered and after a moment he went on.

“He is clever too. He’ll go far. What’s more, he’s steady and sensible, not like a lot of these young chaps who apparently haven’t got a thought for the future.”

He was giving Alan a reference, Elita thought almost hysterically, and longed to ask if he was strictly honest and sober, then bit the words back from her lips. It was not the sort of joke that her father would think funny.

“I am glad he is coming for the weekend,” Mr. Garson went on. “Don’t let’s have too big a party. It’s nicer when we are just ourselves.”

So, Alan was already one of the family, Elita thought! She had lain awake when they got back to the hotel, plotting and scheming how she could avoid being alone with Alan for one moment during the weekend.

She had come down to breakfast in an aggressive mood, ready with a list of people who she intended to ask. It was then that her father had told her what he had found out about the Manfields.

“Money! Money! Money!”

She said the words aloud and turned to see Jenkins, her father’s valet, standing in the doorway looking at her in astonishment.

“Excuse me, miss, but have you forgotten your hairdressing appointment at ten o’clock?”

“I had, as a matter of fact,” Elita said, looking at the clock and realising it was five minutes to ten and she was not yet dressed. “Telephone and say I’ll be late, will you, Jenkins?”

“Very good, miss.”

He would have gone, but Elita’s voice arrested him in the doorway.

“Jenkins, what would you do if you felt you had too much money?” she asked.

Jenkins didn’t look surprised. He had been with Mr. Garson for nearly ten years and had watched Elita grow up.

“It’s not a question I’m able to answer, Miss Elita,” he replied. “I have always been too busy earning my living to worry about money, one way or the other.”

It was Elita who looked surprised.

“But surely, Jenkins, if you were earning your living, you were worrying about money? That was what you must have been working for, money.”

“Not at all, miss,” Jenkins said. “That isn’t how I look at things. A man has to work and has to have a wage to keep himself. But there’s more to it than that. I wouldn’t demean myself to take on a job I didn’t like, that didn’t interest me, just because it was well paid.”

“You wouldn’t?” Elita said.

“No, indeed, miss. As a matter of fact, I have been offered jobs at one time or another that would have brought me in more than I am getting from Mr. Garson. But this is the sort of work I like. It’s what I have been brought up to, as you might say, my father having been a butler and my mother a housemaid. I had always wanted to be a valet and here I am, valeting, I expect, for the rest of my life.”

“And you like it?” Elita asked almost incredulously.

“Very much, miss. I find Mr. Garson a very stimulating employer. He doesn’t let one get into a rut.”

“And yet, you could get more money doing something else?”

“Oh, very easily, miss. There are all sorts of jobs going nowadays. You don’t have to be particularly experienced at them either. They are well paid, but a man needs more than money in his life, that’s what I have always said.”

“That is what I have always said, too,” Elita agreed firmly.

She was about to say something else when the telephone rang. Jenkins walked across the room and picked up the receiver.

“Mr. Garson’s apartment!” he said. “Oh, yes, miss, I’ll tell her.”

He turned to Elita.

“It’s the secretary from the office. Mr. Garson wants to speak to you, miss.”

She placed the cold receiver against her ear. Could it be possible that her father was going to apologise? Why else should he have rung her so quickly after leaving her?

“Hello! Is that you, Elita?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Look here, Alan has just rung me. He wants us to dine with him at the Ritz this evening.”

“Why?”

Elita spoke the monosyllable aggressively. Her father hesitated.

“Oh, I suppose he just wants to see us. Just the three of us, is what he said. We haven’t any other engagement, have we?”

“None. But I don’t think we want to dine alone with Alan. It will be rather dull, won’t it?”

“Dull?”

She heard the surprise in her father’s voice and quite suddenly she saw what was happening. Alan was afraid of the weekend – afraid that there would be too many people there to say what he wanted to say.

When they got to the Ritz, her father would be called to the telephone – it had happened all too often before. He would be away for ages – he might not even return. She would be alone with Alan, whom she had been avoiding almost instinctively these past weeks.

“I cannot do it, Father,” she said quickly. “There is something else, s-something else I have planned.”

“Then get out of it. I want to go. There is nothing else important.”

“Well, I don’t want to dine with Alan,” Elita said clearly.

“Now, Elita, don’t be stupid,” her father argued, and she could hear his voice sharpening a little with irritation. “If you are still sulking about those people you wanted for the weekend, have them. Have anyone you like, but don’t start being difficult where Alan’s concerned. He’s a decent boy and I like him.”

“Why do you like him so much?” Elita enquired. “Is it because you find his conversation so stimulating? Or is it because he’s so rich.”

“Elita, what’s the matter with you?” her father asked. “For Heaven’s sake, stop harking on about money. We had it for breakfast and now it appears we are going to have it for dinner. It’s all very well to talk in that high-falutin’ manner. And where would you be without money, I’d like to know? You’ve never earned a penny for yourself and never likely to. Somebody’s got to keep you. When I’m dead, you’ve got to have a husband who can afford it.”

“I know I’ve never earned a penny for myself,” Elita retorted. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of it.”

“Don’t talk such rubbish,” her father said angrily. “Damn it, I can’t waste the whole morning listening to this nonsense. I’ve made arrangements for us both to dine tonight with Alan. I only rang you in case you had any other plans in hand.”

“Well, I have. I’ve got plenty of other better things to do,” Elita said, “and when you know what they are you’ll be surprised.”

She put the receiver down with a bang, realising as she did so how angry it would make her father that she had cut him off. How dare he say that she had never earned a penny for herself in all her life? How dare he talk in that condescending, supercilious way, knowing that she had been cossetted and caged and never allowed to think for herself? It was not a request that she should dine, with Alan tonight but a command – a command such as up to now she had never attempted to disobey.

She went from the sitting room into her bedroom. It was a huge, magnificent room, meant to be occupied as a bridal suite rather than by a lonely, unattached young woman. Elita shut the door and locked it. Then she looked around her almost desperately as if searching for something on which she could concentrate.

The writing desk by the window caught her eye. She moved across to it, picked up a pen and drew a sheet of pale grey writing paper towards her. Just for a moment she hesitated and then she scribbled.,

‘I am going to show you that I can earn money. What I earn I will send you. I hope you will spend it wisely.’

She folded the paper and thrust it into an envelope, then wrote her father’s name on the outside. She was still angry with a kind of white, controlled rage that made her move deliberately, without haste, her brain clear and unflurried, planning ahead, seeing exactly what she should do.

She chose the minimum of things that she thought she would want – a plain black afternoon dress, a cocktail dress – also in black – which she felt would do for the evening, a few blouses and cardigans, underclothes, all of which were the plainest and least trimmed with lace, shoes, gloves…

When the suitcase was full, she went to the bathroom, bathed and, coming back into the bedroom, put on a plain grey suit. It was one she had bought for travelling when it was impossible for her to get things pressed. It had cost a great deal of money but looked simple, and was not likely to attract attention.

There was an overcoat that went with it. She put that over her arm, picked up her bag and opened it to see that inside she had a wallet filled with notes. She pulled them out impatiently, leaving herself exactly ten pounds. The extra notes – almost an equal number of them – and a cheque-book, which was lying in a drawer of her dressing table, she slipped into an envelope and laid underneath the one she had already addressed to her father.

In the drawer was her passport. She hesitated then picked it up and threw it into her suitcase. She glanced at herself in the mirror. On the dressing table lay a three-string pearl necklace that had belonged to her mother. She loved it, not because it was valuable, but because of who had worn it.

Then she shook her head. It would constitute capital – capital that she had no intention of taking with her.

She put the pearls in the drawer, and then closing her suitcase, she picked it up and unlocked the door. She let herself out on to the main passage. Had she gone back through the suite, she might have met Jenkins, and she had no desire to answer any questions.

The suite they occupied was down a long passage in the quietest part of the hotel. She walked along it quickly and then, as she neared the lift, she saw a man coming towards her. She saw he was hatless and vaguely thought he was one of the staff. She swung to one side to let him pass and as she did so her suitcase, inadequately fastened because she was unused to dealing with such things herself, burst open.

Elita gave an exclamation of annoyance as the clothes she had packed fell out on the floor. A pair of shoes scattered in one direction, her stockings slid on to the parquet and a nylon nightgown seemed to have got entangled with various other garments, so that even the few steps she had taken since the case opened seemed to have left a trail behind of filmy, soft-coloured garments. Elita put her suitcase on the floor and knelt beside it.

“Let me help you,” a quiet voice said.

She looked up to see the man she had been about to pass. He was young and good-looking with fair hair. She took her stockings from him gratefully.

“Thank you,” she said. “I must have been in too much of a hurry to fasten the case properly.”

“It’s always the same with these new suitcases,” he said. “Mine burst open a little while ago at an airport. It was pouring rain, and I had to grope amongst the puddles for my white shirts!”

“Poor you!” Elita exclaimed.

He reached for her shoes, which she had packed still on their trees. She wrapped them in tissue paper and put them on top of the case.

“I’m afraid your things will be rather creased,” he remarked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “All I want to do is to get away.” She spoke without thinking and then realised she had said too much.

“From here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Elita answered. Then added on the spur of the moment, “I-I’m leaving my job. I’m looking for another one.”

“You’ve had a disagreement?” he said helpfully.

“That’s it,” Elita agreed gratefully. “I had a disagreement, a very bad one, and so, so I walked out.”

“Without taking your last week’s wages I suppose?” the stranger suggested.

Elita put the last thing back into the case and looked up at him with a smile.

“You seem to understand,” she said. “You must have done the same yourself at some time.”

“I have often felt like it,” he answered. “But perhaps I haven’t been as brave as you. What are you going to do with yourself now?”

“Look for another job,” Elita said. “You don’t know of one I suppose?”

It flashed through her mind that it would be awkward if he suggested one in the hotel.

“What sort of job do you want?” he asked.

“I think I should like to be an air hostess,” Elita said on the impulse of the moment. “I have always thought I would be rather good at that sort of thing. I can speak two languages – that’s one of the requisites, isn’t it? Shall I go along to London Airport, do you think, and ask B.O.A.C. if they would take me?”

“I have always heard there’s a long waiting list,” the stranger replied.

“Oh!” Elita felt rather discomforted. “Then you think that would be a waste of time to go there?”

“One can always try,” he said.

He seemed to be cogitating over something, looking at her with what seemed to Elita to be an appraising eye. ,

“You said just now you speak languages. Which ones?” he asked.

“French and German,” Elita said. “A little Italian – enough to understand a guide or get anything I want to eat – and a little, a very little, Spanish. But at French and German I am quite fluent.”

“I see.” He helped her fasten her suitcase securely and then they both stood up.

“Thank you very much for helping me,” Elita said. “I think perhaps I’ll risk going to London Airport. If B.O.A.C. won’t take me, there are always the other airlines. I might as well try them all.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” the stranger said.

“What is that?”

“I think I can fix you up in an airline,” he answered. “It’s not one of the big ones, it’s on private charter. But at least you’ll have the experience.”

“Could you really do that?” Elita asked. “But you know nothing about me.”

“And you know nothing about me,” he answered.

“My name is Hans Knudsen.”

“You are not English then?” she said in surprise.

“My mother was English,” he answered. “But my father is a Dane.”

“Oh, you are Danish. That’s why…” She was just going to say, “That’s why you are so good-looking,” but then she checked herself. It was far too familiar a thing to say to someone she had just met.

Instead, she said, “That’s why you speak such good English. All the Danes I have ever met speak perfect English.”

“I bow to the compliment,” Hans Knudsen replied. “And what is your name?”

“Elita Gar...” she stopped suddenly. She had almost given herself away, she thought. Who didn’t know the name of Garson? She gave a little cough.

“I seem to have got something in my throat,” she said. “It must be the fluff off the carpet. Gardener, that’s my name, Elita Gardener.”

Hans Knudsen bowed as if they had just been introduced by a third person.

“What I was going to suggest,” he said, “is that we might talk about this. Suppose we go down the back stairs and out of the side door? It would be a mistake, I think, for us to be leaving by the main entrance. There’s a little café round the corner where we could talk. I could tell you about this job.”

“That sounds to me a wonderful idea,” Elita said.

She glanced over her shoulder, suddenly afraid that Jenkins might appear from the suite. There was also a maid who came in to press her things who might be arriving about this time.

“Let’s hurry,” she said quickly.

Hans Knudsen led the way down a side passage she had not noticed. A few seconds later, they were hurrying down the back stairs and he was carrying her suitcase. Just for a moment, Elita wondered what her father would say if he saw her escaping from the hotel with a strange man, a man she had picked up in a corridor, a man of whom she knew nothing. Then with a little smile she realised the man knew nothing about her either.

She felt herself draw a deep breath of excitement. This was adventure! This was life without money!

2

A bored waitress took Hans Knudsen’s order for two cups of coffee, and then they were alone, smiling a little shyly at each other across the narrow table.

“Will you get into trouble coming out with me like this?” Elita asked.

“Trouble?” he questioned, raising his eyebrows.

“I mean, will the people in the hotel notice that you have gone?” Elita explained.

He smiled at her.

“I think we are safe. I do not think anyone will notice my absence for an hour or two, but it is kind of you to think of it.”

“What do you do?” Elita enquired, glancing again at his plain, dark jacket and striped trousers.

Perhaps he was in the reception, she thought. She didn’t remember seeing him there.

“We have come here to talk about you,” he reminded her. “If you are to get a job today, we have to hurry.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

Her curiosity evaporated a little. She became absorbed with her own problems. Of one thing she was certain – that neither he nor anyone else must guess that she was not what she appeared – a secretary or companion, someone of no particular consequence who was looking for another job. If anyone should guess…

She paused in her thoughts. Visions of blackmail slipped through her mind, then were dismissed instantly.

The man opposite her had a frank, honest face. He was good-looking too, but that had nothing to do with it. There was something about him which made her feel she could trust him and that he would not let her down.

“You want to be an air hostess?” he was saying, gravely.

“I suppose there are other things I could do,” she said a little hesitantly, not wishing to admit a lamentable inadequacy of talents when it came to typing, doing shorthand or anything that was a requisite for a good secretary.

“As I said to you just now,” Hans Knudsen went on, “I do happen to know that there is a large waiting list for all the main airlines. But I have a friend who has a special service of privately chartered planes – the Golden Eagle Line it is called. It hasn’t been going long, but it has been a great success, and he is very proud of his achievement.”

He pushed the pepper-pot about absentmindedly as he went on.

“My friend was talking to me only a few days ago of the necessity of having air hostesses for his longer flights. If I could get him to see you, would you go along there right away?”

“But of course,” Elita said. “I should be very glad of the opportunity.”

He glanced down at her hands, white and soft, with long, beautifully manicured fingernails.

“I suppose you know what duties being an air hostess entails?” he asked.

“I’ve got a very good idea,” Elita answered. “In fact, so good that I wonder if it’s absolutely necessary to tell him that I actually have no previous experience.”

She felt that Hans Knudsen looked at her quizzically and went on quickly.

“You see, I’ve done a lot of flying. My last employer took me all over the Continent and, as it happens, to Africa and Egypt. I never felt airsick, and I can remember very clearly exactly how the air hostesses looked after us – in fact I was very friendly with one of them.”

“Well, if you are quite certain you can do it,” Hans Knudsen smiled, “will you wait here while I telephone my friend?”

“Of course,” Elita answered.

He rose from the table and went out of the café, and Elita remembered that just round the comer she had noticed a callbox. That was where he would be going, she thought.

She gave a little sigh and pulled her cup of coffee towards her. It was a sigh of excitement and tension – a sigh, too, of anticipation. How thrilling this all was! How much better to do this than to go out to lunch with some of the friends her father had chosen for her, to wander round the shops buying things she didn’t really need and to look forward to an evening with Alan – Alan asking her the question she didn’t want to hear.

She wondered how long she had got before they began to look for her. Her father was not likely to get back to Claridge’s until it was time to dress for dinner. He would then ask Jenkins where she was, and he would reply that he hadn’t seen her all day. Her father would go into her bedroom and find the note. What would he do?

Elita smiled to herself as she thought of his anger and what must inevitably be a sense of frustration. The one thing he would want to avoid, above all things, was that the press should get to hear that she was missing.

Granite Garson hated publicity. He was rude to the press whenever they tried to interview him and he would fume with rage when Elita’s name appeared in the gossip columns saying,

‘The beautiful daughter of the great financial wizard’, or, ‘Tycoon’s daughter dancing at a ball’.

“The country’s becoming like America!” Granite Garson would exclaim in disgust. “There’s no private life left. These news-hogs are everywhere trying to earn thirty pieces of silver by betraying the secrets of decent people who only want to be left alone.”

“It’s what the public want,” Elita had said once timidly, and her father had roared at her so loudly in his anger that she had never attempted to defend the press again.

Now she realised that his dislike of newspapers was going to be an asset in her own favour. He would have to keep very quiet about her disappearance. He would have to use what she called his own secret service to try to find her.

Secretaries whom he could trust, men whom he had employed for years, agents with whom he was in contact all over Europe – all would be told confidentially to look out for her.

Elita’s mouth set for a minute in a grim line.

“I will defeat him,” she promised herself. “I will show him not only that I can do without his money but that I can earn my own.”

She sipped her coffee, found it was nearly cold and looked apprehensively towards the door. What a long time Hans Knudsen was being! Supposing that after all he had decided not to help her and had gone back to Claridge’s, leaving her alone here.

Somehow she felt he would not do that – and yet what did she know of him? He was just a strange man whom she had picked up in the corridor, an employee in the hotel.